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Look-Up from a Look-Up Field

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AlliAlosa
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

A very useful feature to have would be the ability to โ€œdrill-downโ€ another level when working with Look-Up fields.

We use AirTable to manage our company E-mail accounts and Distribution Lists (Distribution Lists are email addresses that contain members and distribute messages to all who are assigned to it, i.e. info@company.com can go to John, Mary, and Paul). Here is the basic set-up between 3 tables:

Table PEOPLE contains a list of all employees, and links to EMAIL which contains all email addresses (including distribution lists)
Table EMAIL links to DIST LISTS
DIST LISTS contains a lookup field to list the names of people on each distribution list.

I am running into this problem: because a distribution listโ€™s members can contain OTHER distribution lists, I cannot get a comprehensive list of all members wherever this happens (which is often). For example (using arbitrary email addresses)โ€ฆ

say "info@company.com" has 2 members: john.doe@company.com and hr@company.com
"hr@company.com" has 2 members: jane.doe@company.com and jim.doe@company.com.

The lookup field will only give me โ€œJohn Doeโ€ as a name as it doesnโ€™t drill-down another layer to lookup the names under hr@company.com. I managed to set-up a second level of โ€œSub-Membersโ€ with some linking (a bit too complicated to explain here), but it would be so helpful to have the ability to look-up a second layer.

I know this sounds complicated - I did my best to try and explain in the most simple way I could!

10 Comments
Jeremy_Oglesby
14 - Jupiter
14 - Jupiter

This is related to my request for LOOKUP and ROLLUP to be made available as functions for formula fields.

If they were available as functions in a formula field, it could open up the possibility of exploring deep links via a LOOKUP within a LOOKUP - assuming itโ€™s used to reference a linked record field limited to a single record, LOOKUP(linked-record-field, field-in-linked-record) could be:

LOOKUP(Email, LOOKUP(Person, {Last Name}))

to dive across 2 tables to retrieve the value displayed in the formula field.

AlliAlosa
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

I couldnโ€™t agree more - that would allow much more versatility than what Iโ€™m describing. If it were available as a formula function it would be EXTREMELY helpful.

Matt_Hardy
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I need this too! Hopefully this will be noticed by the Airtable team and added soon?

Derek_Richardso
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I would like this. My first day on airtable trying to implement getting data like this. Seems odd you canโ€™t do this.

Oliver_Holtz
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

I want to bump this topic, because I need this, too! I have to do ugly workarounds where other tables contain lookup fields that those tables donโ€™t actually need, or to link records manually that I could just look up if this was possible.

Simon_Aronson
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Me too! Definitely something that I need!

Karen_Chan
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Definitely something that I need as well!

Maya_Bialik
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

I also really need this!

Dewi
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Iโ€™ve also found that this feature would be incredibly useful. Airtable, please let us know if there are any plans for this feature, otherwise Iโ€™ll find some workaround

Dan_airtable
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

canโ€™t you combine the lookups with an array formula or am I missing something? You can also look into a linked record and link the lookup. So you can get all the lookups you need in every table and combine them with a formula field